Charlotte Lamb

Charlotte Lamb (1937-2000) was the best-known pen name of Sheila Holland, a British novelist who wrote more than 160 books, most of them romances for Mills & Boon, with worldwide sales reported at over 200 million copies.

She was born Sheila Coates on 22 December 1937 in Dagenham, Essex, and educated at Ilford Ursuline High School for Girls. She worked as a typist at the Bank of England and as a junior researcher at the BBC before marrying the journalist Richard Holland in 1959; he encouraged her to write. From 1977 the family lived on the Isle of Man, where she died at her home, Crogga, on 8 October 2000. Two of her daughters, Sarah and Jane Holland, also became writers.

Her first novels were historical and romantic titles published in hardback by Robert Hale under the name Sheila Holland, beginning with Prisoner of the Heart in 1972. She adopted the Charlotte Lamb name in 1973 with Follow a Stranger, and by the late 1970s was producing up to twelve Mills & Boon novels a year. Well-known titles include The Long Surrender (1978), Possession (1979, the first of her Enemies and Lovers books) and A Violation (1983). She also wrote as Sheila Coates, Sheila Lancaster, Victoria Woolf and Laura Hardy, and her final novel, The Angel of Death, was published posthumously by Hodder & Stoughton.

For collectors. Her earliest books are the Robert Hale titles issued as Sheila Holland in the early 1970s, such as Prisoner of the Heart (1972), Love in a Mist (1972) and Falcon on the Hill (1974). The first Charlotte Lamb title, Follow a Stranger (1973), appeared from Mills & Boon and as Harlequin Romance no. 1722.